Mike's Super Short Blog

writing about reading about writing about development in order to write about development

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

*Record scratch* Yep that’s me. You’re probably wondering how I ended up in this situation.

Let’s start with this whole reading thing. I was never really a “reader” type person. I did get into graphic novels after first reading Watchmen before the movie came out. It kinda blew my mind and idk Alan Moore really spoke to my teenage angst. But besides comics, I just didn’t read. Even for school I would usually just read the spark notes or something and then bs my way to an A (sorry Mrs. Winstead).

Fast forward to the start of this year, my wife and I are expecting our first child and I’m trying to soak up as much knowledge as possible. So I got 2 books: We’re Pregnant! The First Time Dad’s Pregnancy Handbook and Transformed by Birth. Both really great and def recommend. Ok so I finished the books and now I’m feeling pretty good. Like hey I can get behind this whole reading thing. It feels good to not stare at a screen and still gain knowledge and perspective. 🌈🌟

So baby pops out. Of course, things get a lil busy. Not sure if you know this but babies kinda take up a lot of time. I do try to keep reading. I actually read Stuart Little and The Pearl to our newborn. But it got tougher as she grew and started needing more interaction. But hey I don’t just give up (well maybe for a small bit), I pivot to audiobooks. And now we’re really cookin with grease! I can zip through one of these bad boys in no time. And that’s while still making it through my massive podcast queue for the week.

Alrighty now I’m kinda starting to feel more like a “reader” type person. Torc then starts up a book club. I really love that Torc is a tech community but this book club is focusing on non-tech, fiction books. And now I guess at this point I love books so much that I join a second book club lol. This one is with the Overcommitted podcast community.

ALL THIS TO SAY, the next book in the Overcommitted book club is Writing for Developers by Piotr Sarna and Cynthia Dunlop. The whole point is to literally write more. So here I am (insert this blog post title). It’s also nice that this is at the tail end of the year because I really would like to try and write more in 2026. I like to write. At least I think I do… I guess I don’t get enough time to dedicate to it to really find out. But I want to give it the ol college try. I’m hoping to get ~~peer pressured~~ encouraged to write more by members of the book club.

That’s it. That’s where we’re at. I don’t know yet if I’m really going to write more (and become a “writer” type person) but hey at least I’m reading more. And that’s a win in my book (see what I did there).

Anotha One 🎙️

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Keeping this one super short and sweet.

I had a blast being featured on the Job Decoder podcast! Hosted by my Torc pal Angelos, we chatted it up about improv theater, technical support, IT, and how you need empathy to thrive in all the above.

Check it out the stream recording on linkedin or youtube.

Of course shout out to the best dev community in the game, Torc. If you ain’t there, you square. So join already ya goober.

instrumental music to study / not be distracted to 🎶🙈

Wed, 21 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I know it’s not obvious due to my impeccably professional and well-put-together demeanor, but I get distracted super easily. At times, it can get pretty bad. For example, I can’t listen to music with lyrics while I try to work. I just can’t help but fixate on the words. So, when I work I like to listen to instrumental radio on youtube — think lofi or chillhop type stuff. Neato right? Well, I will often get bored of the music I’ve been listening to. This really shouldn’t be a big deal, BUT I get wayy too distracted searching for music on youtube. I’ll find myself clicking on random videos and you can just forget about it if I click on a short and start scrolling… RIP productivity.

So I started to use a nifty pomodoro timer app called tomatillo timer. It syncs up music with the work/study and break intervals. That would be just fine and dandy on its own but, again, I found myself going down the youtube rabbit hole when I wanted to change up the music.

So, I made a lil workaround. Which now leads me to…

✨ Raycast script commands ✨

Sidebar, in case you didn’t know, Raycast is a spotlight replacement app for macOS. Ok back to the program. To keep it super short n sweet, “script commands” are Raycast commands that you create to trigger scripts. That’s it! I find them useful in that I don’t need to create an actual extension or anything — I just want a short lil script to execute a thing and then move on. See Raycast Script Commands for reference and more details that I won’t dive into here. But basically you just tell Reycast the directory that the script lives in and then add a special header comment to the top of the script.

# Required parameters:
# @raycast.schemaVersion 1
# @raycast.title cmd-name
# @raycast.mode compact

# Optional parameters:
# @raycast.icon 🤘

ℹ️ This is just the basic header. You can configure command arguments and whole lot more.

Ok so now to land this thing. I saved some of my favorite videos in a markdown file. This command triggers a lil bash script that grabs a video ID from that list at random and copies to the clipboard. This allows me to paste that into the pomo timer app. I should also note that the paid version of the app allows you to use a youtube playlist URL which would also solve this problem. I do really like the app and would love to support the dev, but money is a bit tight at the moment (see this post).

I guess just to wrap it up, Raycast is dope and I find creating little scripts to make my life easier to be fun and super easy. Next step is to make an actual extension, but so far I really haven’t felt the need to with script commands. If you want, you can check out my repo of these scripts here.

How to actually use Homebrew 🍺

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Ok, so I lied… I actually don’t want to write up a full-blown tutorial or really detailed how-to guide. I feel like there are plenty of those out there. But, what I will say is these guides typically gloss over one of the main features that really makes Homebrew so powerful… the Brewfile ✨

I actually didn’t even use one until pretty recently tbh. It wasn’t until I got a new work computer that I found myself searching for apps and running brew install blahblah over and over again. At that point, Homebrew is only marginally better than googling the app and downloading the dmg. The Brewfile is what makes getting up and running with all your apps and packages a breeze. Let’s get into it.

A Brewfile is a way to define a list of packages, casks, and other dependencies that you want to install using Homebrew.

A basic Brewfile looks like this:

tap 'homebrew/core'          # A tap is a repository of formulas
brew 'git'                   # Formula for a package
brew 'node'                  # Another package
cask 'google-chrome'         # A cask for a GUI app

You can either create this file manually or you can generate one based on all your installed formulas and casks. To do this, run:

brew bundle dump

This will create a file named Brewfile in your current directory.

Note: if you use vscode, then you will also see all your extensions listed in here too. This is a bit annoying for me because I just sync all that automatically anyway. You can just delete these lines from the file or you can add the --no-vscode flag to the above bundle command. You can also set the $HOMEBREW_BUNDLE_DUMP_NO_VSCODE environment variable. I just added it to my .zshrc file like so:

export HOMEBREW_BUNDLE_DUMP_NO_VSCODE=1

Ok what were we talking about? Oh yeah so we created the Brewfile. Since I have a personal computer and a work computer, I created two separate files. You can do this by specifying the filename in the dump command. For example:

brew bundle dump --file="Brewfile-work"

So now let’s say you get a new work laptop because your old one got wet while you were playing beer pong in the pool. If you have this Brewfile-work file, you can just run this and you’re good to go:

brew bundle --file=/path/to/Brewfile-work

If you want to learn more about all the flags for the bundle subcommand, check all that out here.

Alrighty, that’s about it. Just remember not to bring your laptop anywhere near the pool…

One Big Year Ends, Another Begins ✨

Fri, 10 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT

So this is the obligatory new year post. 2024 was kinda a big deal. I got a new job — finally as a software engineer. My wife got a new job. We did doom metal goat yoga. Yeah you read that right. So yeah kinda a big deal. Oh yeah and we found out we’re PREGNANT! 🎉🎉🎉

Wild stuff. I’m super super excited and also a tad bit nervous. It goes without saying that 2025 will be an even BIGGER year for us. As I write this, we actually have a birthing class tomorrow and the next day. Overall, lots and lots of learning! I going to be a freakin DAD! I’ve already been an avid pundamentalist of sorts, but now I really have to exercise those dad joke muscles 💪

Well that’s about it for this post. I’ll catch y’all in the next one. Don’t forget to check your oil and rotate your tires!

Comunidad 👥

Thu, 09 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

One of the things you may hear while starting your career in tech is to join a community. That’s all well and good, but there’s literally a TON of communities out there and it can be super daunting to know where to start.

And that’s ok. It’s ok to be a bit unsure and scope things out. See what all is out there and try out a whole bunch of communities — you can be as involved as you want and find your “home base”. But that is sort of the key. You want to find at least one community that you can call your “home base” in order to better establish stability and support.

This has been my strategy at least and so far, so good! I’ve “joined” a whole bunch but really landed on a couple to call home — one large and another small.

I feel like this is a nice middle ground in that one community has a ton of members and resources, and the other is a small budding community where I can have a much more involved presence.

We got Techqueria (this the big one). And we got Hispanic Hackers (the small one). Techqueria is actually a sponsor of Hispanic Hackers, so that’s cool. As mentioned above, because Hispanic Hackers is a bit smaller, I feel like I can get involved more. I’ve started to assist with our monthly online social in our Discord and it’s been really fun. So far, it’s been pretty chill — just joining in a voice chat with folks and talking about our current projects and really just anything interesting going on.

Alrighty, so let’s wrap this whole thing up. I’ll leave you with a bunch of tech communities that you can check out:

NEW: Torc - Developer networking and talent network thing. It’s cool I promise.
NEW: Dad’s in Tech - For dads… in tech! Hit me up for an invite
Hispanic Hackers - I mean yeah I am a bit biased but it’s pretty cool
Techqueria - It’s like Hispanic Hackers but much much larger with chapters across the US and even Puerto Rico and Mexico City!
freeCodeCamp - Not just great for learning to code, but also a fantastic community for new devs
Major League Hacking - Awesome resource for hackathons. They also run a monthly “Global Hack Week” where they live stream and host sessions focusing on a specific topic.
100Devs - I heard some great things about this bootcamp/community/agency(?). There’s a bumpin Discord too. I never went through the curriculum, but just being a part of this community is badass.
Equipt - This is like a professional development type community that hosts regular live sessions with industry professionals.
And then you got a whole bunch of other communities for specific languages (Python and Go have really good communities), Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) for cloud and DevOps stuff, communities around dev podcasts (Sytax.fm, The Changelog, Boot.dev), and even communities around dev Twitch streamers and Youtubers.

Yeah and that’s just scratching the surface…

Well what are you doing still reading? Go out there and ✨network✨

I turned my old macbook into a linux server because why not 🍎🐧

Sat, 02 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Alrighty, so just like those stupid recipe sites, I’ll first write up 5 pages telling you a long unnecessary story about my first experience with Linux. I’ll then explain how what you’re referring to as “Linux”, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux.

… nah just kidding. Literally everyone hates that.

But for real, I had an old 2013 MacBook Pro that’s been gathering dust so I figured I’d throw Linux on there. To spice things up just a tad, I don’t have any ethernet in the house (it’s a rental). I would need to set the server up to have a static IP via wifi.

It was super easy and def didn’t frustrate me at all or take me 2 days to finish.

Gonna keep this as short as possible and just link out to other guides for the most part.

Installation

Download the Ubuntu Server 24.04.1 LTS (or whatever version) iso file.
Follow these steps to create a bootable USB
1. Flash it to a USB drive (should be at least 5GB) using balenaEtcher
2. Boot Macbook to USB
Follow these steps to install
1. One thing to note if you are like me with just wifi, you may not see your network connection configuration during the install. I first tried to install via offline mode. This proved difficult post installation when I needed my wireless drivers. You can probably get this to work by installing drivers on another system, putting them on a drive, then installing on your server… but I figured it would be quicker to reinstall 🤷
2. I highly recommend just hardwiring your laptop during installation. For me, that was plugging directly into my ISP-issued modem/router/switch thing (technical term) using an ethernet to USB-A dongle.

Post-Installation

Alrighty so right after install, do the thing and update all packages: sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
Okie doke so now the fun part. After (and during) install, my OS didn’t recognize my wireless card. This thread was exactly what I needed 👌
Next step was configuring a wifi connection with static IP. I found this guide, which got me mostly there, but it’s for dynamic IP with DHCP. I got that working, then asked my good friend Claude to help me update my config for a static IP. Here’s what my Netplan configuration file ended up looking like (I changed the IPs and removed specific names so pls don’t hack me 🥺👉👈)

network:
  version: 2
  ethernets:
    <ethernet interface name>:
      dhcp4: true
  wifis:
    <wireless interface name>:
      dhcp4: false
      addresses:
        - 192.168.0.21/24
      routes:
        - to: default
          via: 192.168.0.1
      nameservers:
        addresses: [192.168.0.1]
      access-points:
        "<SSID>":
          password: "<password>"

After that, just restart the NetworkManager service or reboot and you’re all set!

Congrats you did it! 👍

New Job! 🚀

Mon, 05 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT

After about 7 years of doing IT and Technical Support, I am now officially making the transition to Software Engineer! It’s been a journey to say the least. I feel like I definitely took the long road here, but hey I made it.

For the past four years, I’ve been working as a Technical Support Engineer at LogicMonitor. Saying that I’ve learned a lot would be an understatement. This platform touches so many technologies, and as support you have to know how the platform interacts with all these technologies — I’m talking Cisco, VMware, Juniper, Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, NetApp… like I can keep going or just search here. Anyway! In this troubleshooting, I would need to help find and document bugs within our monitoring suite and I guess over time I built a bit of a reputation with the Monitoring team that builds these data collection modules (like in a good way).

So what’s even this job? The Monitoring team is responsible for creating suites of modules for collecting metric data. These are like extensible, discrete snippets of code that come together and integrate with those specific technology vendors mentioned. This code is embedded and ran on the Collector, which is a Java application running on a server within a customer’s environment. These are mostly written in Groovy or PowerShell. Another important part of this role is working on our internal dev tooling which is mostly written with Python.

When folks say that networking is important for job hunting, I think people sometimes forget about their current employer. I guess assuming they like their employer of course. Be prepared for those opportunities because they may open up unexpectedly, and when they do, you’ll be ready.

I’m super excited and ready to start this next chapter of my career!

Long time no blog / I've been working on an app / Flutter is pretty cool / Nuron early access is available now 🧠

Sun, 19 Nov 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Ok so it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything…

To keep it short, after my bootcamp I accepted a volunteer position at a non-profit organization as a Flutter developer. I’ve never used Flutter or Dart so that’s been keeping me pretty busy lately. Honestly, Flutter is pretty sweet! I like Dart and the dev tooling around Flutter makes working with it super seamless.

If I’m being real, a part of me is wondering if learning Flutter and Dart will hurt with job hunting. I put that on the back burner for sure, but also Flutter is just more of a niche framework (well ok maybe not lol). I think if anything it’s been giving me some prospective and learning a new language is never really a bad thing.

Ok, so about the project. Like I said, it’s a Flutter project. We’re using AWS Amplify for the backend and heavily using BLoC architecture. Bloc is sort of mind bending at first, but I think I’m beginning to wrap my head around it — shout out to Flutterly on Youtube.

The app is called “Nuron” and it’s a self-empowerment productivity app. Right now, the early access version is available on all major platforms: App Store, Play Store, MacOS, Windows. Right now, it’s a paid app (but hmu if you want a code 😉). We will be implementing a more freemium type model down the road for general release.

Here’s the landing page: https://thenuronway.com

I was on a podcast 🎙️

Mon, 24 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMT

This was pretty cool. I have been familiar with DonTheDeveloper for a bit. I actually watched a couple of his videos about Nucamp before making my decision to attend. So it was a little surreal to get hit up in DM on LinkedIn by Don asking if I’d like to be on the podcast. I legit thought it was spam.

But yeah, I had a good time! Hopefully, this video can help someone with their bootcamp selection.

Oh yeah here’s the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQksD9a-9bw

Reddit Sucks 👎

Wed, 14 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Reddit sucks now…

I saw this blog post and archived my stuff. Idk if I’ll stop using the platform altogether but it’s a real shame that these companies are pricing out third-party apps. 😢

Bootcamp 🏕️

Mon, 22 May 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I did a bootcamp! Completed the ‘Full Stack Web + Mobile Development’ camp over at Nucamp. It was pretty sweet!

Full disclosure, I actually have a CS degree from UT Austin. BUT… and that’s a BIG ol BUT… I never learned any web development. I did a good amount of theory stuff and networking. I learned Java. But then never really utilized any of these skills. Then BAM! Like 7 years went by 🙀. Crazy how time flies. Long story short, I’ve been doing IT/Support. It’s honestly been pretty interesting and I’ve learned a lot about tech just in general. Those on-call shifts are the best!

That said, I’ve been craving a change of pace. Specifically the breakneck speed of modern web dev. So here we are. I just graduated (with honors) 🎓 🎉 🏅

You can check out the course repo here. And my honors project repo here.

So yeah blogging…

I’ve been told tech/dev blog are a REQUIREMENT for any self-respecting web developer:

So I’ll be writing up quick lil blogs. I’m not really sure about what or how frequently. Keeping it light, casual, and fun. Like my dating life! jk I’m married.

Peace ✌️